...Two things immediately stuck out to me. First, the date is anachronistic. I knew that Marie Antoinette was certainly not in France in 1750, and wondered if she was even born then. Second, the woman in the painting has a striking resemblance to Paris Hilton, who may be considered a celebrity for no reason other than her publicized debauchery. By digging further, I was able to confirm my initial thoughts. Marie Antoinette was born in 1755. This led me to wonder: Does Kilimnick only know that she was an 18th Century queen; is the artist making a point that most people would not question the date in the title; or does she simply not care that the title date is flawed regarding its subject? ...While this is not my specialty, I believe that Kilimnik’s “Marie Antoinette” painting exemplifies contemporary art in the post-Andy Warhol world. It is designed to make the viewer think and make modern connections while also considering the past. In terms of the anachronistic title, I do not think the artists made an historical mistake, but rather (in true Warhol fashion) she simply did not care. [https://wthistory.wordpress.com/category/museums/] Kilimnik plays games with us. Her Marie Antoinette Out for a Walk At Her Petite Hermitage, France, 1750, is a 2005 portrait of Paris Hilton. Nothing and no one in Kilimnik's world is what they seem. All of which I find both tiresome and precious. The Philadelphia-born artist's Haystack in a Field of Forget-Me-Nots might depict exactly what its title suggests, but it looks to me like a tousled blonde wig discarded in the grass, and even more like a rear-end view of Dougal, the Magic Roundabout dog, as he wanders off in search of a tree. At a stretch it could be a haystack - after all, some of Monet's looked like cupcakes glowing in the sunset. Perhaps this is a clue. Kilimnik's art is full of references; the problem is picking the right one. And it is not just Kilimnik's paintings that complicate things.... Her paintings and drawings hang in a creepy, dark-blue room watched over by a roaming spotlight, with the paraphernalia of a seance - tarot cards, a crystal ball, some feathers and some dice scattered on the floor; in a fake half-timbered, wattle-and-daub English dining room (and what is hung on the wall of this salon? A painting depicting the very room itself. Spooky). They also line a gallery done out as a tack room with oxblood-coloured walls, with saddles and reins hung about the place and riding boots lined up at gleaming attention. They hang on green walls in a fake orangerie with wooden garden benches looking out on Kensington Gardens. None of this is as entertaining as a Harvey Nichols window display. In the middle of the Serpentine's grandest gallery Kilimnik has installed a suite of wobbly walled interconnecting rooms, covered in hand-blocked wallpaper and hung with brass wall-lamps and reproduction antique mirrors. Staffordshire ceramic dogs decorate the mantelpiece above a blank fireplace and a grandfather clock lurks in the corner. From the outside, it looks like a Josiah Wedgwood Tardis, but at least once you are in there you can escape Kilimnik's paintings. Yet hark: there is a faint sound of singing, distant snatches of old movie dialogue, a clattering harpsichord, and what sounds either like a waterfall or next door's overflowing toilet cistern. To augment the catalogue to the exhibition, the Serpentine has produced a small book consisting of a dialogue between ArtForum magazine editor Scott Rothkopf and art historian Meredith Martin. To begin with, I thought this lengthy, brow-furrowing conversation had to be as much of a spoof as Kilimnik's work itself. But I am assured that it is a deadly serious examination of the art historical antecedents, conscious quotations and erudite games Kilimnik employs. So it turns out that the painter is an artist whose sense of history is so acute that even the masters whom she reveres give her a kindly nod from beyond the grave. Discussing Kilimnik's borrowings from Joshua Reynolds, Martin suggests that "she picks portraits and fancy pictures by Reynolds, and not the grand heroic subjects that he might have wanted her to choose, given his desire to elevate British art". Such dialogues with the dead are all very well. Martin also observes that the painters Kilimnik quotes are "not exactly household names today", listing Gainsborough, Watteau and Gillray, amongst others. Well, I suppose it depends on the household. Rothkopf talks about the affective charge of Kilimnik's work, and how this has to do with the gap between the kind of paintings she looks at so intently, and the kind of painting she actually achieves, as if this itself were a comment on our own time, and where we have come from. Just as there is something slick, shiny and unpleasant about the water-soluble oil paint Kilimnik uses, in place of the real thing, so there is about the characters who populate her paintings. They are genre types from central casting: boys by Gainsborough and Romney, ladies from Thomas Lawrence, horses out of Stubbs and John F Herring. Kilimnik turns them all into My Little Pony. Thomas Lawrence - a sort of Cecil Beaton of his day - was known for his flashy, swagger portraits with their bravura brushwork and theatrical compositions and lighting. Kilimnik's brush slithers and niggles. Maybe that's what her smug and saccharine-pretty young women, the dogs, horses and deer, the famous actors and dodgy celebrities deserve. Kilimnik wants, I think, to make an equally decadent art for an even more decadent and perverse time. Advertisement It is all very well to praise what in effect is her weediness as a painter, as an antidote to nasty, old-fashioned traditional manual skills, but painting is painting. She's a fair mimic, and can busk, but Kilimnik's touch manages to be somehow diligent, undistinguished and slick at the same time. It hasn't any real character, which it might have, were her awkwardness given free rein. Instead what we get is a sort of inoffensive and gawky magazine illustration. The whole show is a sort of dreary, Sunday-afternoon conversation piece. It is all too much. It isn't enough. [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/feb/22/art.adriansearle]